Talk:Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (BrianJ add-on)

Size of the article

What about splitting the article into a few more, by the mission timeline? The article is quickly nearing the point, where you get "Did not read, article too long".

--Urwumpe 16:31, 17 September 2008 (BST) I did not know an article can be too long. I've never had that happen before. Of course this is, as you can tell if you have been reading along :-), a very complicated mission. I'll split it into 2 parts, and more if it gets much longer.

Maybe you can help with the current challenge. The challenge is: have the Centaur impact the moon 4 minutes before LRO is overhead, and then have LCROSS impact the moon right when LRO is overhead. (240 seconds later) I have some ideas, but it's mostly guesswork at this point. Do you have any ideas on the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks, Xroads 04:19, 18 September 2008 (BST)

Well, I would assume they are all in the same plane, So all I can modify for passing over the region of the moon is eccentricity and semimajor axis and argument of perilune. LRO would not impact on the moon, so this is fairly easy. LCROSS would need to separate and maneuver again away a bit. The Centaur is the reference. I could write a small Java application to solve this problem by using genetic algorithms, would be the simplest idea I have currently. Should also be possible to solve this directly by math, but I I fear that the number of solutions would require another optimization pass afterwards anyway. --Urwumpe 10:34, 18 September 2008 (BST)